Please name some liberal economists who say that. Everything minimum-wage related I’ve ever found on the website of the Economic Policy Institute says different.
Has economics done anything recently to warrant the respect shown in this thread? I thought it was a game played by academics, the object being to explain why your predictions were laughably wrong but not as wrong as the other guys. Everyone’s pet ideas are simultaneously right and wrong no matter what happens because there’s no consistency in their real world applications. All sides can point to examples of their theories “working.” A discipline doesn’t collapse in humiliation by failing to model reality. There’s always an excuse. Austerity failed? They weren’t austere enough! No wait, it did work, in this random province in 1972!
If economics is a science it’s closer to alchemy than physics.
The EPI is a Big Labor-funded think tank:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Economic_policy_institute
Now I’m not claiming that liberal economists don’t favor increasing the minimum wage anyway, but they favor it for reasons other than economic considerations. Paul Krugman has written extensively on the minimum wage when wearing his economist hat, and he says that it increases unemployment. When wearing his politics hat, he’s in favor of it. Because raising minimum wage is good politics. And bad economics.
Not really, his economical and political hats are matching here.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/minimum-wage-economics/
Nobody claims economics is an exact science. However, politicians are going to be making economic decisions on way or another. Do you think it is better if they do it totally in the dark? Do you think intuition (in a downturn raise tariffs to protect our industries) results in anything good?
Most of the bullshit we hear - the government should be run like a family - comes from intuition, not economics.
So what? How does that mean it’s not a group of liberal economists?
Can you describe the thought process that led to this claim?
Personally, I’d much rather be poor than dead, and I’d rather that all my family and friends be poor than one of them be dead. By extension, it seems to me that I’d be willing to accept a social order in which we were all poorer on average but also had less of a chance of dying suddenly.
I can accept that not everyone agrees with me. And I can also see that passing laws against owning guns might not accomplish my goal of reducing the chance of sudden death, but the claim that one thing is less important than the other appears to be a pure value judgment that not everyone would or should agree with.
Yes, but your chance of dying suddenly is extremely low. In the big picture, it’s something we just accept as the price of allowing private ownership of firearms, just as the annual traffic fatalities are something we just accept as the price of using automobiles for transportation.
On any given date, that is; in the long run it approaches 1.
I feel like this is begging the question. You’re claiming that people who want to take action to reduce gun violence are misguided, because gun violence is less important than other issues. And your followup is that the level of deaths is accepted as a price of our gun policy. Obviously, it’s not a level that some people are willing to accept as a price of our gun policy.
All I see is a value judgment here. There’s nothing wrong with your judgment, but it’s your interpretation of what’s important, and it’s an interpretation that not everyone agrees with.
Without automobiles, we’d be in great economic misery, so I do agree that we should accept a certain risk of violent death as a tradeoff. Without guns, we’d be… well, lots of countries have much lower rates of gun ownership and correspondingly lower rates of violent gun deaths. What are they losing out on, exactly?
As used in American political discourse, the term “economic conservativism” is as much a matter of morality as “social conservatism.” To see this one has only to listen to those who complain about taxes, and what they think those taxes are spent on.
Many Americans single out foreign aid (money paid to teat-sucklers who aren’t even American) as the biggest waste. Certainly none of these complainers has glanced at a breakdown of the federal budget. And of the very tiny portion of the budget spent on foreign aid, the vast majority of that is spent either in Iraq and Afghanistan – countries the U.S. broke – or in military aid to further U.S. geopolitical power.
As a percentage of GDP the federal budget is now exactly what it was in 1983 under Reagan. About half that is spent on self-financed pension systems, and related programs. Over half of “discretionary” spending is spent on the military. One can quibble with the definition of “discretionary,” but the preceding sentence remains true if SNAP and Child Nutrition programs are considered discretionary. Among the biggest items in “non-defense discretionary spending” are Veteran’s Benefits, Transportation, Justice and Homeland Security. Please keep those facts in mind when you peruse posts like this one:
This Doper, and millions of “economic conservatives” who think like him, have never perused the federal budget, nor have only clue about the relative costs of government programs. There are useful debates among professional economists, but “economic conservative” voters don’t engage in economic theory. They’re all about morality:
[ul][li] Stop stealing from me.[/li][li] The needy have only themselves to blame.[/li][/ul]
I’m curious who Shagnasty thinks are “economic liberals” and who are “economic conservatives.” For 33 years it has been, consistently, the Republicans who have driven up the debt. I once thought “fiscal conservativism” described a preference for balancing government budget, but in fact most people who adopt that moniker favor lowering taxes in all situations. Ignoring the recent stimulus to save the financial system from the credit collapse (largely caused by deregulation), the largest deficits have been under Reagan and Bush-43. Even the Obama “stimulus” had tax cuts (insisted on by the GOP) as its largest component.
But in our two-party system, economic policies really don’t change all that much between administrations. So vote your conscience, not your wallet.
No; reality says that. Obviously, someone who does not earn enough to survive cannot continue to work – because of nature’s laws, not man’s – unless (horrors!) he is externally subsidized. That being the case, a minimum wage is actually the least distorting option (compared to the existing arrangement of subsidizing the employer by having the taxpayers provide the extra income required for survival).
But the “natural” economic unit is not an individual, it’s a family. And the determination of whether they’re making enough money to survive on should be on a monthly or annual basis, not per-hour-worked.
Which is why subsidies like the EITC and welfare are much more efficient policies than the minimum wage: they’re targeted at households that actually need the help. There’s no reason that we should artificially boost the income of teenagers working part time, or that we shouldn’t boost the income of someone who makes $20/hour, but can only find 5 hours of work a week.
Plus they don’t provide a disincentive for people who provide marginal labor to be employed at a market rate and learn soft skills that will enable them to get higher paying jobs.
“Soft skills”?
Are you under the impression that politicians are making decisions based on sound economic theory instead of ideology and political convenience?
The problem with economics is not that it isn’t “science”. The problem is that people can’t agree on what constitutes “working”. To conservatives and libertarians, they may feel that a system where the rich can get as rich as they can and anyone who can’t make money can go fuck themselves is “working”. Socialists and left wing types may believe that a system where everyone is poor, but enjoys a standard and consistent level of economic safety and security is “working”. Both systems are predicted easily enough through the application of economic theory.
To be fair, that’s because Wall Street owns both parties. And we really do need to put that to an end. Some really strong progressive economic policies that will curb the power of the money boys are what’s needed here, not shrugging and letting the same system keep happening. That’s why I’ve gone third party. Go Green!
Well, to be fair, the economists didn’t anticipate the crash of 2008 or the perils of derivatives (I’m sure someone did, but on the whole … no). So they kind of failed a basic, real-world test here. I don’t think they deserve a lot of credibility.
Well, yes. The difference is that the Dems are not wholly owned, and include some progressives hostile to the business agenda at both the leadership and grassroots levels.